IT IS FAR FROM AXIOMATIC THAT PERIODS OF CUL-
tural and political ferment produce art effectively addressing that ferment. The relationship between art
and politics within the discourse of modernism has
been particularly troubled. Kathe Kollwitz's haunting
pleas for the working class, Pablo Picasso's brutal antiwar protests, and George Grosz's venomous satire
appear to stand firm within the canon of modern art.
Yet there has often been a deep ambivalence about
mixing art and politics, even in periods of tremendous turmoil. This was at no time more evident than
during the sixties, when New York's avant-garde
responded to the Vietnam War with what Susan
Sontag called an "aesthetics of silence." 1 The artist's
dilemma, as the critic Max Kozloff observed in 1967,
was that of "trying to resolve divergent obligations." 2
Morality and art made for uncomfortable bedfellows;
to be explicit about politics was to court banality and
naivete-or, put in more extreme terms, to run the
risk of "preaching in a fancy form." 3
In California this ambivalence has been remarkably
absent. What we find instead is a striking confluence
of political agitation and passionately engaged art.
California's role in twentieth-century politics is itself
extraordinary. It is difficult to ignore the state when
considering the peace and social justice movements of
the sixties and seventies. The San Francisco Bay Area
took the lead nationally with the founding of the free
speech movement in 1964 on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and with the birth of
the Beat and hippie countercultures, which catalyzed
profound social change across the country. 4 While
the civil rights and peace movements grew simultaneously in cities nationwide, California played a
significant role in their development. In their wake
came the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the revolutionary Black Panther Party
in Oakland, as well as some of the most radical manifestations of gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism.
All of this activity was accompanied by an outpouring of political art unmatched elsewhere in the
United States. Indeed, from the fifties until the early
seventies, one had to look to California to find significant numbers of artists seriously engaged in political expression. During the Vietnam War in particular, at a time when many agreed that combining art
and politics could only result in "well-meaning aesthetic embarrassment," artists on the West Coast
found ways of revitalizing the genre of political art. 5
They did so by breathing new life into the iconography of protest-which, as the painter Ad Reinhardt
correctly observed, had fallen into a state of exhaustion.6 They also extended the conventions of traditional formats, notably mural and poster art. One of
the most intriguing results of the pairing of art and
politics in California was a breaking away from conventional art media to produce new vehicles of expression. The desire to critique and circumvent the
commercial art establishment led to a variety of avowedly antimaterialist, often inherently uncollectable
forms of art, from junk assemblage to performance
art, conceptual art, and video. It could be argued that
political art is one of California's more significant contributions to American art of the twentieth century.
Despite the importance of this contribution, the
present volume represents the first broad examination of political art in California after the Second
World War. 7 The subject is discussed in studies focused narrowly on topics ranging from art created in
Japanese American internment camps in the forties
to the culture wars of the nineties. In recent years,
with the newfound respectability that political art has
gained in contemporary discourse, the literature has
grown substantially. The revival has precipitated a
number of critiques, beginning with the writings of
Lucy Lippard, whose books on protest art and identity politics- notably Get the Message? A Decade of
Art for Social Change (1984), A Different War: Vietnam
in Art (1990), and Mixed Blessings: New Art in a
Multicultural America (1990)- look well beyond the
mainstream to include many of the artists Peter Selz
2
SUSAN LANDAUER
discusses in this volume. Lippard's inclusive approach
is taken up by Thomas Crow's The Rise of the Sixties:
American and European Art in the Era of Dissent,
1955-69 (1996), the first major text to explore California political art in an international context. According
to Crow, the cultures of resistance that appeared on
the national-international stage first emerged on the
West Coast. Crow credits the radical counterculture
of the Bay Area in the fifties with initiating a spirit of f l
protest that had "exponential repercussions to come
across the rest of the country and the world," although he does not explain why New York produced
comparatively little relevant art other than to observe
that the "political temperature" there was markedly
cooler. 8 Francis Frascina's Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of theArt Left in Sixties America (1999), the other
major attempt to survey political art of the sixties,
finds the same disparity. Concentrating on Los Angeles and New York, Frascina delineates in scrupulous
detail an entrenched formalist orthodoxy operating
in league with corporate and government interests to
keep political art from making inroads in the East
during the late sixties. However, other than identifying fewer restraints in Los Angeles, he does not make
a real effort to account for why political art flourished
in California.
Arguably the best analysis of the subject to date
is Richard Candida Smith's Utopia and Dissent: Art,
Poetry, and Politics in California (1995). Although
Candida Smith's scope is early for our purposesconcentrating primarily on the Truman and Eisenhower eras - he explores aspects of the ideological,
socioeconomic, and historic roots of both the political ferment of the period and its artistic expression.
As Candida Smith points out, many of the values of
liberty and dissent taken up by the New Left were first
articulated by the community of artists and poets in
the San Francisco Bay Area who came to be known
as the Beats. Essentially, Candida Smith argues that
the fundamental lack of support for contemporary art
coupled with a growing opposition to canonical modernism after 1950 resulted in a self-sufficient under-
und network of printing presses, artist- and poetgalleries, and private venues. The sustaining idegv of this strikingly independent community was
·of "the innocence of the clean slate"- an almost
-~· ·g.ious belief in personal experience as the only auntie source of values. Well before "question aurity" became a mantra of the sixties, the artists and
of this community challenged- albeit quietly,
·ork that was often never publicly presented- a
e-at many restrictions on freedom of expression in
• i.. life and art. Candida Smith notes that while they
tributed little to the civil rights movement or to the
que of poverty, the ideas they expressed through
u art, poetry, political activism, and personal exple played a vital role in fostering dialogue on isrelating to sexuality and gender construction, cappunishment, ecology, and the Vietnam War.
Cindida Smith's study provides useful background
r understanding how artistic and political forces
ific to California aligned themselves, yet he does
: place them in a national context, nor does he exwhy those forces were distinct to the region and
- found in, say, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago-crs also distant from New York's art market. Those
- had their contingent of political artists (Chicago
ially) , but they were less consequential in terms
th political agitation and artistic response. 9 The
-.uI explanation for California's political activism is
estate's newness, that is, its recent settlement by Eu~n Americans, its consequent lack of entrenched
ditions, and its special position on the farthest edge
..: the "New World." According to this view, these disctive attributes have made California particularly
_~n to breaking conventions and embracing new
eas. Whether this characterization is recognized as
-eality or potent fiction, it is nonetheless routinely
.....otted out as the source of the state's radicalism. 10
_~cphe n Schwartz, in his book From West to East:
C:ilifo rnia and the Making of the American Mind
998), makes this the guiding thesis for his examiation of California's trend-setting contributions to
"\Jilerican culture. He argues: "California was radical
from the beginning. It was not simply new, it was the
newest society ever to have reached full development. ... California's role in a series of 'cutting edge'
historical developments, in which it always occupied
a forward post, its favorable geographical situation,
and its instant rise to immense wealth during the Gold
Rush have made it unique in the world. All societies
undergo periods of radicalization; California has
never known anything else." 11
Yet almost the precise opposite could be argued .
While California played a significant role in empowering the New Left, it was equally responsible for vitalizing the New Right. Although Schwartz is sound
in his assessment of the extent of California's radicalism, he misses the source of that impulse, as so
many cultural historians do. Admittedly, California
has been a wellspring of antitraditionalism. It is true
that from the early 1900s the seclusion of Southern
California from entrenched institutions made it a
haven for some of the most radical social experimentation in the country. As we have heard repeatedly, the region spawned mystic cults, nudist colonies,
and utopian communities. Writing in 1921, John
Steven McGroarty observed that "Los Angeles is the
most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes
of ethics, philosophies- no day passes without the
birth of something of this nature never heard of before." 12 San Francisco's brand of radicalism was more
political and evolved along more established lines.
Unlike Los Angeles, which had no real bohemia, San
Francisco had developed an avant-garde by the start
of the twentieth century, with its North Beach emulating Paris's Montmartre. San Francisco was host to
some revolutionary groups - notably the Industrial
Workers of the World, the ragtag organization of anarchists and socialists that the Los Angeles Times nicknamed the Wobblies. As early as the 1900s San Francisco could claim the most powerful labor movement
in the United States, a movement that culminated in
the Great Strike of 1934, which demonstrated to the
country that a union of longshoremen could effectively shut down a city. During the Second World
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES
3
War, the Bay Area became a center for pacifism. As
Kenneth Rexroth pointed out, half of the nation's
camps for conscientious objectors were within hitchhiking distance from the bay. 13
Nonetheless, California's Left has always competed with a formidable strain of conservatism, and
during the radical years of the sixties that conservatism was on the rise. Instrumental to the growth of
the New Right was the tremendous boom in California's defense industry, which eventually overtook
agribusiness as the engine of the state's economy. No
other development in California transformed the region more than its strategic positioning as the staging area for the succession of wars in the Pacific. 14 In
the early years of the cold war the federal government
pumped more than $150 billion into arming the
American West with the apparatus of massive destruction.1 5As the cold war historian Kevin Fernlund
has written, the result was a landscape that "bristled
with airfields, army bases, naval yards, marine camps,
missile fields, nuclear test sites, proving grounds,
bombing ranges, weapons plants, military reservations, training schools, toxic waste dumps, strategic
mines, transportation routes, lines of communication, laboratories, command centers, and arsenals." 16
The link between right-wing politics and the defense
industry is encapsulated in the extremely conservative enclave of Orange County. By 1964 Orange County
produced ninety percent of all advanced communication for the nation, and sixty percent of its employees worked in the aerospace industry. 17 The explosive
growth of the defense industry, which reached its peak
during the height of the Vietnam War, was accompanied by an equally explosive growth in population, as
California surpassed New York in 1962 as the most populous state. Advocacy of defense thus became closely
allied with bread-and-butter issues of growth and expansion, and Southern California emerged as the
center of the "military-industrial complex" identified
by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 presidential
farewell address. Allied with this growth of industry
and the military in the state was an increased need for
4
SUSAN LANDAUER
research, leading the University of California to rapidly multiply its campuses, eventually becoming the
largest state university system in the country. During
the free speech movement, it would become a heated
point of contention that the school's growth was not
merely an accommodation of the mushrooming population but was fueled by an infusion of defense research funds. 18
Integral to the growth of the Right in California
was the intensification of anti-Communism, a natural corollary to the Right's pro-defense patriotism. It
is no coincidence that two of the nation's most highprofile conservatives-Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan-rose to the top of California's political ladder waving anti-Communist, pro-defense banners.
Reagan's rise is a quintessential California "success"
story-from president of the Screen Actors Guild to
star witness against his Hollywood colleagues before
the House Un-American Activities Committee, to
spokesman of General Electric (which played a vital
part in the defense industry), to governor of California, and ultimately to the presidency of the United
States. 19 The anti-Communist crusade was, of course,
a national development most identified with the
senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. The McCarthy era in American history has come to denote
a time of conformity and suppression- in essence, a
domestic cold war of internal containment. But the
narrowing of politically and socially acceptable behavior was particularly restrictive in California, where
the military's presence was the strongest. As the historian Kevin Starr has argued, conservative efforts to
control "subversive" individuals - often in the form
of invasive red-baiting- were particularly rancorous
during the reign of California state senator Jack Tenney. The highly publicized investigation of Hollywood's Left in the late forties led to the blacklisting,
arrest, and persecution of more than three hundred
people in the film industry. With the imposition of a
loyalty oath by the regents of the University of California in 1949, which forced the school's 3,200 professors to choose between their academic freedom
and their livelihood, the university partnered with the
government in what became a wide-ranging attack on
the left-wing intellectuals of California. 20
In short, California during these critical years was
hardly a permissive "land of personal expression, innovation, and experimentation" that provided a natural cradle for cultural change in America. Rather, the
region was characterized by a violent clash of contend:ng forces-between a strong and growing political
~eft and an increasingly powerful Right supported by
immense financial interests. Most important, it was
the very friction between those forces that became the
essential catalyst for agitation, providing what the art
historian Renato Poggioli has called the "antagonistic moment"-or in this case, the series of antagonistic
moments-that typically ignites an avant-garde. 21
Because the friction between these forces was especially extreme in California, the rupture was particu'arly severe. The cold war historian A. Yvette Huginnie might have been describing the situation more
generally when she likened the struggle of race relations in the West to "an earthquake, produced by teconic plates rubbing against each other as they slowly
·ostled for position." 22
The first of these seismic ruptures was, not surprisingly, a reaction to the draconian censorship of
California's intelligentsia for more than a decade.
On May 13, 1960, in a confrontation that came to be
NlOWn as Black Friday, approximately two hundred
demonstrators, mostly students from the University
of California, Berkeley, sought admission to San Francisco City Hall to protest a hearing by the House Un_\merican Activities Committee. 23 They modeled
their demonstration on the sit-ins that had begun
only months before in North Carolina, when several
black students refused to move from a Woolworth
lunch counter. 24 The demonstration in San Francisco,
unlike previous altercations, was met with immediate government-sponsored violence. When the students sat down and refused to leave, four hundred policemen reportedly hosed them and beat them with
clubs, dragging many down the marble steps by their
feet and hair. The incident was a watershed, nationally and internationally, setting a precedent for radical activism by students throughout the sixties.
Black Friday served as a prologue to the free
speech movement on the Berkeley campus four years
later. The largest instance of campus disobedience
in the country's history to date, the free speech movement not only helped secure First Amendment
rights on campuses nationwide, but reaffirmed
constitutional protection of organized advocacy and
freedom of assembly on a broad civilian scale. The
free speech movement was also, ultimately, a warmup exercise for the upheaval over the Vietnam War.
Although the war was clearly an event of national
and international magnitude, Berkeley once again
took a leadership role in organizing student dissent.
When the radical activist and future Yippie Jerry Rubin decided to organize the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965, his prospects were bleak, as a former student at Berkeley recounted: "At the time
pacifists, leftists, and independent-minded intellectuals who denounced the Vietnam War were ignored;
few Americans objected to the war." 25 Although earlier that spring the University of Michigan had organized its landmark antiwar "teach-in" and the first
major march on Washington, D.C., by Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS) had drawn an estimated
25,000 demonstrators, the event Rubin organizeda two-day series of speeches and performances at the
Berkeley campus, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Norman
Mailer, Phil Ochs, and Alan Watts and culminating
in a march-represented the largest campus opposition to the war to date. The media surrounding these
events helped bring to national consciousness the
gravity of the war, which had begun its dramatic escalation from 1964to1965, when the number of U.S.
troops on active duty in Vietnam had increased from
23,000 to 184,314. 26 In the next few years, demonstrations swept across the nation with the revelations
of atrocities: Operation Rolling Thunder, a policy of
saturation bombing that dropped seven million tons
of explosives (about twice the total used on Europe
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES
5
and Asia in World War II), leaving an estimated
twenty million bomb craters on a country of 128,400
square miles; Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed
approximately four million gallons of herbicide and
defoliant over the countryside; and most wrenching
of all, the My Lai massacre of March 1968, in which
an American platoon senselessly executed, mutilated,
and raped more than three hundred civilian women,
children, and elderly men in a South Vietnamese
village.
The controversy over the Vietnam War was particularly strident in California, not only because the
defense industry sharpened the polarity of the state's
politics, but because of its geographic position as
gateway to the Pacific. The war could not simply be
ignored when California was the last mainland stop
on the way to Vietnam and the first point of entry
from the battlefield. Between 1965 and 1968, 222,750
soldiers passed through the Oakland Army Base
alone on their way to the Pacific. 27 The return num bers were similar: veterans came flooding back through
the state's ports-some wounded, some former prisoners of war, many of them to stay- and so did the
dead. A particularly chilling reminder of the war's toll
was the participation of Oakland-based World Airways in Operation Babylift, which rescued thousands
of orphaned babies and children from Vietnam in
1975. 28 California also became home to the largest
population of Vietnamese refugees in the world, most
settling in San Jose and Orange County.
The final and perhaps most significant clash between Left and Right in California occurred with the
rise of the social movements of the sixties and seventies. Again, California's experience was part of a
widespread national rupture, but one that was especially acute. To begin with, the liberation groups that
emerged in California during the Vietnam War had
a lot to do with the state's participation in that warand the two preceding wars. California already had a
long history of discrimination, with its large immigrant labor populations of Chinese, Japanese, and
Mexican descent. California's Alien Land Law, the
6
SUSAN LANDAUER
Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of 120,000
Japanese Americans, and Operation Wetback are but
a few well-known examples of racial prejudice that
affected minority groups in the West. 29 Yet the groups
that had suffered the most in the past- Chinese and
Japanese Americans-were the least active in the liberation movements of the sixties. 30 This made perfect sense in the new socioeconomic climate of the
cold war West. Unlike Chicanos and African Americans, who experienced worsening economic and social conditions after the Korean War, Asian Americans tended to benefit from militarization. Between
1950 and 1965 Chinese and Japanese American men
with training in engineering and science joined the
white-collar workforce as they took high-paying jobs
in the defense industry and for the first time enjoyed
middle- and upper-middle-class status in appreciable numbers. 31 During the sixties Japanese Americans
were on the whole better educated than whites, and
college deferments kept many from being called into
military service.32
This suggests how critical the impact of the cold
war was in sparking political unrest in California. The
magnitude and speed of the demographic shifts that
occurred in the fifties and sixties, coupled with the repressive social developments, set the stage for insurrection among the groups in the state who faced the
greatest discrimination during those years-African
Americans, Chicanos, and gays. Along with the successes of the civil rights movement under Martin
Luther King Jr., the free speech movement and massive antiwar protests inspired emancipatory fervor. In
many cases agitation for civil rights combined with antiwar efforts. It is no coincidence that in the summer
of 1965, only a few months after President Lyndon
Johnson ordered a large increase of combat troops to
Vietnam, the Watts riots erupted in South Central Los
Angeles - one of the largest civil disturbances in
American history, with 3,952 arrests and an estimated
forty million dollars' worth of damage. The 2.5-squaremile area housed half a million African Americans,
many of them migrants from the South who had come
to find work in the defense industry. 33 During World
War II African Americans found employment working in the shipping and aircraft industries, but in the
fifties and sixties the increasingly technical defense
jobs went to whites and Asians. The Vietnam War not
only tended to reinforce black-white segregation in the
workforce, but blacks were also drafted into military
service in disproportionate numbers. 34 The Black Pan-·
ther Party leaders in Oakland were among the first to
speak out against the high number of African Americans going to war, asserting solidarity with the nascent
Chicano movement. 35
The Chicano liberation movement came of age
the same year as the Watts riots. In 1965 Cesar Chavez
organized the Great Delano Grape Strike in the San
Joaquin Valley, an event that helped make him the
country's most visible Latino activist and led to his
successes in California's labor movement through the
United Farm Workers of America. The conflicts that
gave rise to the Chicano movement were much the
same as those affecting African Americans: a massive
immigration during the decade after World War II
(between 1944 and 1954, "the decade of the wetback,"
it is estimated that the number of undocumented
workers coming from Mexico increased sixtyfold),
followed by discriminatory housing, wages, education, and- a particularly sore point in the sixtiesoverrepresentation in combat and casualty rolls. In
April 1968, the month that King was shot, ten thou sand Mexican American students walked out of six
East Los Angeles high schools to protest racism. Their
disruption of the largest school system in the United
States marked the entry of Chicanos into mass social
activism, including many protests against the Vietnam War, culminating in 1970 in the march organized by the Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles,
one of the largest off-campus antiwar demonstrations
in the nation.
Adding to this tide of protest activity, the women's
movement arrived in 1966 with the founding of the
National Organization for Women (NOW), based in
Washington D.C., and gay liberation soon after, fol-
lowing the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. 36
While California did not assume a position of national leadership in the women's movement, 37 gay
pride ascended to prominence in the state, eventually earning San Francisco the title of "the gay capital of America." Like the Chicano and African American movements, the struggle for gay rights in the
West was profoundly shaped by the Korean and Vietnam wars and specifically catalyzed by conservative
efforts at containment. Hostilities began with government and military purges during the fifties and
sixties. (According to navy records, that branch of the
service alone discharged an average of 1,100 sailors a
year for homosexuality between 1950 and 1965.) 38 As
early as 1950 some conservative politicians in California were comparing the "gay menace" to the threat
of Communism. But this harassment only helped the
homosexual cause; as Huginnie has noted, "An irony
of the high-profile persecution of gays and lesbians is
that it helped to 'mark'-define and advertise-that
very identity [and thus] helped to put Los Angeles and
San Francisco on the map as West Coast centers for
gays and lesbians." 39 By the seventies an estimated
200,000 of San Francisco's residents were gay men and
at least another 50,000 were lesbians. 40 San Francisco
was among the first cities in America in which gays and
lesbians gained electoral clout. A historic breakthrough
was reached with the election in 1977 of openly homosexual San Francisco county supervisor Harvey
Milk, whose assassination less than a year later made
him a martyr for the gay cause. 41
THE R EMA RKABLE political ferment in California
does not in itself explain the artistic response it generated, which formed a striking contrast to the initial
near-silence of New York's avant-garde. As mentioned
earlier, one basic reason for the disparity was that the
structure of art production was entirely different in
California. In cities across the state, teaching positions
rather than art sales provided support for artists,
which gave them greater independence from the con straints of commerce. 42 Thus conditions in the West-
OVERVIEW: COUNTE RING CULTU RES
1
particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had
few commercially successful art galleries until the
early seventies-were conducive to a far greater range
of artistic expression. This lack of competitive pressure meant that California artists were not locked into
the market-driven orthodoxy that held New York
artists in its grip. That orthodoxy can be summed up
by the critic Clement Greenberg's dictum that contemporary art "should confine itself exclusively to
what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in other orders of experience."43 The writings of "Greenberg and the group"
(as the critics who held sway in those years became
known) were highly influential in promoting an art
entirely drained of extra-aesthetic meaning. 44
Yet this was an ideology that ran deeper than mere
marketing strategy; it had to do with shifting attitudes and alliances among the artists and intellectuals
associated with the Old Left. Essentially, the effects
of McCarthyism, combined with a growing boom in
the art market and its cult of personalities, served to
compromise- one might even say de-fang-whatever
political aspirations those erstwhile radicals may have
had. 45 Nonetheless, for the generation that emerged
in the thirties nurtured on Marxist debate, abstraction itself had become politicized, standing for freedom and a hard-won triumph over Fascist and Stalinist realism as well as capitalist kitsch. 46 They took
refuge in the premise that Meyer Schapiro put forth
in his landmark essay "The Liberating Quality of
Avant-garde Art" (1957)-the idea that rejecting tradition was itself a political act, and that the autonomy
of art, as a form of personal liberation, was the only
guarantee of political and ethical integrity in an otherwise deterministic wor!d.47 This became an ideological tenet of even the most left-leaning artists of
the Abstract Expressionist generation like Ad Rein hardt and David Smith. In the sixties it would con tinue to serve as a rationale for New York's color field
painters, Pop artists, and Minimalists. The Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, a high-profile political activist who belonged to the Art Workers' Coalition and
8
SUSAN LANDAUER
was among the New Yorkers who participated in the
Los Angeles Peace Tower in i966, echoed the sentiments of some of the Old Left when he insisted that
art and politics should remain in separate spheres. But
Judd had trouble refuting those still scarce but increasingly vocal political artists like Leon Golub.
Golub sounded an ominous warning to formalists in
i969 when he wrote to the editors of Artforum: "The
abstract sculptures etc., in our cities become grimacing monsters if viewed in political or utopian contexts .... Those arts that began with the modernist
dream of human freedom may find they serve technological masters and the American empire." 48
By contrast, California's postwar avant-garde was
much more closely allied to New Left thinking and,
indeed, as the historian Stewart Burns and others have
argued, presaged a number of shifts in American radicalism.49 There were certainly artists in California who
followed the formalist imperatives emanating from
New York. This was particularly true in early sixties Los
Angeles, where a contingent of abstractionists clustered around the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood,
keeping politics at a safe distance from their art. One
of the gallery's mainstay artists, Billy Al Bengston, for
example, refused to participate in antiwar protests, by
one account explaining cynically that "with the war going on all the people in Orange County had money to
buy his art. "50 But Bengston represented a minority
view. Far more significant for the evolving political
discourse was the social commentary of the California Beats, a loose-knit, somewhat nomadic association
of artists of largely anarchist and libertarian persuasion.51 The Beats formed a true underground in the
sense that they functioned almost entirely through
such noncommercial means as cooperative galleries
and private presses. Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner,
Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, Jess, Ben
Talbert, and their literary cohorts Robert Duncan,
Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Stuart Perkoff,
Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Jack Spicer were
among the artists and poets who, as early as the forties, began to reject the formalism that had become
BEN TALBERT
THE ACE, 1963
Assemblage, 96 x 50 x
38 in. Nora Eccles
Harrison Museum of Ar t
Utah State Uni versity;
Marie Ecc les Caine
Foundation Gift.
obligatory in New York and to embrace a far more
inclusive approach that combined an intense personalism with an uncompromising critique of societyspecifically, of the increasingly conservative culture
of cold war America. In their visual art and writings
(which were sometimes collaborative), the Beats
attacked a wide range of issues, including bigotry,
homophobia, xenophobia, consumerism, censorship
of all kinds, the destruction of the environment,
America's "colonial" foreign policy- and most of all
(not surprisingly, considering they were in California), the growing military-industrial complex, which
Ginsberg denounced as America's "Moloch." 52
Significantly, the Beats were not only witnesses to,
but also targets of, conservative efforts at social con-
tainment through sanctions both legal and illegal.
There are many examples that could be cited, but a
few stand out: After publishing a candid essay on
homosexuality in i944, Robert Duncan found himself
banned by the literary establishment. 53 In the midfifties the North Beach police continually harassed the
black poet Bob Kaufman for having a white girlfriend;
finally an officer stamped on Kaufman's foot and
broke his toe. 54 When the artist Cameron was found
living among blacks in Pasadena, a bench warrant was
issued for her arrest. Wallace Berman was denied unemployment benefits in Los Angeles because of his
beard. Any explicit reference to sex was met with police action. The numerous arrests and trials of California artists on obscenity charges became causes celebres
OVERVIEW: C O U NTERING C ULTURES
9
Clure's poem "Poisoned Wheat" (1965), which laid
bare the sins of America's founding, 55 were in an important sense precedents to, if not early manifestations
of, the New Left's activist spirit. With the increasing
media focus on the Beats, what had begun as a private
underground began to fire a collective imagination far
exceeding the boundaries of the art and poetry worlds.
Ironically, the attempt to render the Beats harmless by
a process of Dobey Gillification (that is, making them
cute and laughable "dropouts") only served to swell
the ranks of California's counterculture, laying the
ethical foundation for the student protest movements,
the hippies, and the rebellious youth culture that
spread across America.
Thus, the Beats not only responded to the ferment;
they played a major role in catalyzing it. And yet their
work has been described as fundamentally apoliticalat least in the strict sense-in that it was generally designed for a private audience as a kind of personal
catharsis shared among like-minded individuals.56
George Herms's Secret Exhibition of 1956, for example, scattered over a series of weed-choked lots in Hermosa Beach in Southern California, was seen by only
a very few. 57 Wallace Berman's hand-printed magazine
in the art community and beyond. The arrest of Berman for exhibiting a drawing of a couple copulating
(it was, in fact, a drawing by Cameron), the attempt
by police to close down Edward Kienholz's show at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art because of the
artist's "obscene" Back Seat Dodge '38 (1964, p. 95),
and, most famously, the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1955) are just a few of the better-known
highly publicized incidents of censorship.
In response to this unrelenting antagonism, some
Beats withdrew, while others became increasingly
bold in their critiques and open about their unconventional lifestyles. Ginsberg's declaration of his
homosexuality in the national press in 1959, at a time
when same-sex relations were still illegal in most states,
Michael McClure's defiant play The Beard, which
scandalized San Francisco in the mid-sixties and Mc-
CHARLE S BRITTI N
ARTH UR RI CHER ,
WALLACE BERMAN,
JO HN R££D, VIC£
SQUAD OFFI CER, 1957
Ge latin silver pri nt.
Co urt esy of t he
photographe r.
10
SUSAN LANDA UE R
Semina-produced from 1955 to 1964 and containing
poems, photographs, and drawings-frequently dealt
with highly charged political issues, from civil rights
disturbances in Alabama to the censorship of Lenny
Bruce, but its distribution was limited to a small
group of friends. His Semina Gallery is yet another
example of the Beats' disregard for public exposure.
Housed in an abandoned roofless boathouse in the
Larkspur marshlands, the gallery literally sank into
the mud after hosting exhibitions by Berman's
friends, each show lasting no more than a few hours.
Typical of Beat assemblage, most of the works shown
were made of cast-off materials and have long since
perished. Such junk sculpture, or Funk Art, as it was
later called,58 was itself a political statement-a rejection of the consumerist culture of the postwar era
and specifically of the elitist politics of the art market.
While Beat art was in a certain sense anti-elitist,
its political impulse was never truly populist. This is
arguably the deepest ideological divide between the
political art of the Beats and that of the subsequent
generation. In the sixties populism virtually exploded
in California, bringing with it a profusion of political art forms that aimed to reach beyond the art world
to a mass audience, mirroring the simultaneous burst
of political activism. This tendency was particularly
evident in the flamboyant counterculture of the Bay
Area, where in the mid-sixties Haight-Ashbury "entrepreneurs" opened "free stores" that ridiculed consumerism. There was even an anarchist street theater
group called the Diggers (named after a seventeenthcentury English sect of religious communists), which
gave away or burned money and made free lunches
for thousands in the Panhandle. 59 This group popularized guerrilla theater in San Francisco, performing
impromptu critiques of war, racism, and capitalist excess in the parks and streets of the city. 60
Of the artists associated with the Haight-Ashbury
counterculture, it was perhaps the psychedelic poster
designers who most embodied this populism. Victor
Moscoso, who had studied at Yale University with
Josef Albers, exemplified the egalitarian spirit when
he stopped painting after realizing that "for a dollar
or two anyone could buy one of his posters."6 1 In fact,
many posters were free. Rock concert impresario Bill
Graham recalled tacking up dance posters along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in i966, and after finishing
fo ur blocks discovering that people were taking them
down as fast as he could put them up. After that he
gave away posters to all advance ticket purchasers, but
ultimately "bowed to the inevitable and offered free
posters to all who attended." 62 While artists like
Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Joe McHugh, Satty, and Wes
Wilson did not attempt to effect changes at the courthouse or ballot box, they did seek to foster an insurgent consciousness that challenged the consensus
values of American culture. With their eye-catching
neon colors and turbulent designs, these artists cap tured the ecstatic revelry of psychedelics and in doing so hoped to change conventional perceptions of
S A TTY
STONE GARDEN, 1966
Lithograph, 35 x 23 in.
© East Totem West.
life itself- to make an impact on what R. D. Laing
called the politics of experience. 63
As an art form that is not only anti-elitist but
also inherently public, posters became the obvious
medium of choice for a wide spectrum of activists
in the sixties and early seventies. During that period
thousands of posters were made for various political movements, from Chavez's strikers to the Black
Panthers to Vietnam War protesters. Political posters
were already a well-established genre in America,
having gained particular prominence during World
War II, when illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and
N. C. Wyeth popularized images of victory and patriotism. The new breed of American poster artist took
inspiration from the European avant-garde and transformed the medium from a vehicle of governmentsponsored propaganda to an expression of dissent.
OV E R V I E W: C OUNTERING CULTURES
11
ROBBIE CONAL
MONICA LEWINSKY, 1998;
HILLARY CLINTON, 1999;
BILL CLINTON, 2000
Charcoal on canvas,
approximately 22 Y2 x 18 Y2 in.
each. San Jose Museum of
Art. Gift of James OtisPeaceful Warrior Collection.
12
Political poster artists often circumvented the commodification system by means of private production
and public dissemination. With no funding or institutional support, artists were forced to think, as
the Los Angeles painter and activist Irving Petlin remarked, in terms of "the disposable and transitory
life of the streets." 64 Petlin himself helped organize
one of the earliest and most dramatic artistic protest
events of the Vietnam War era- the Artists' Protest
Committee's White-out of i965, which plastered
the facades of art galleries along La Cienega Boulevard with posters stamped with the group's "Stop
Escalation" logo. Associated primarily with the antiwar protests of the sixties, this kind of guerrilla activity survives today in the poster art of Robbie
Conal, who stages "art attacks" against Republican
and Democratic leaders alike in "secret midnight
blitzes" that cover the streets of Los Angeles with his
satires. 65
Of all movements in California during the sixties
and seventies, the Chicano movement gave the greatest prominence to the poster as a tool for political action. As George Lipsitz has observed, Chicano posters
"functioned as part of the movement itself, as vital
forms that performed important work in the struggle for social change." 66 The first graphics were proSUSAN LANDAUER
duced in the mid-sixties for Chavez's United Farm
Workers Organizing Committee to help mobilize its
boycotting efforts. With the advent of communitybased collectives, or centros culturales, throughout
California in the early seventies, the impetus shifted
to a broader range of concerns, from immigration
and border politics to police brutality, drug abuse,
and gang warfare. In more recent years poster artists
such as Ester Hernandez and Richard Duardo have
continued to articulate issues of identity and cultural
and historical reclamation.
If posters reach an audience far greater than that
of paintings, sculpture, or even photography, so do
murals, the other major art forms that reemerged
in the early seventies. Like posters, political murals
are hardly unique to California, but they have been
especially prevalent in the state and have continued to
remain a vital form of contemporary expression.
San Francisco has a particularly strong history of
political mural production, beginning with the projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration
in the thirties, notably the Coit Tower frescoes, which
caused considerable controversy for their alleged
Communist innuendos. The arrival in that decade of
the Mexican muralists known as Los Tres GrandesDiego Rivera in San Francisco and Jose Clemente
ESTER HERNANDEZ
SUN MAD, 1982
Screenprint, 22 x 17 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Los Angeleseft a lasting legacy. When mural art experienced a
resurgence in the early seventies, many artists turned
to Los Tres Grandes for inspiration, positioning them-elves in the populist tradition of the Mexicans. Mural
"ainting has proved to be a particularly powerful tool
:or a variety of social and ethnic movements. In Cali:ornia, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native
_-\rnericans, women, and gays have all used murals
·o enhance cultural solidarity- an objective clearly
.. nunciated in 1974 by the women's collective Las
Mujeres Muralistas of San Francisco: "Our intent as
artists is to put art close to where it needs to be. Close
to the children; close to the old people; close to everyone who has to walk or ride the buses to get places." 67
Not surprisingly, considering the strong Mexican
antecedents, the Chicano movement has dominated
the mural renaissance. Along with printing posters,
the major artistic activity of the centros has continued to be organizing mural projects. Plaza de la Raza
in East Los Angeles, founded in i969, and Galeria de
la Raza in San Francisco's Mission District, founded
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES
13
JUDY BACA
GREAT WALL OF LOS
ANGELES: DIVISION
OF THE BARRIOS &
CHAVEZ RA VINE; THE
BIRTH OF ROCK &
ROLL (DETAIL ), 1983
Acrylic on cast concrete.
© SPARC
ww w.sparcmurals.org.
in 1970, were among the first centros to bring together
artists and residents to create murals throughout
their neighborhoods. The spirit of collaboration has
been crucial to mural making in Chicano communities, as it has for other disenfranchised groups. The
Chicano movement is particularly notable for forging alliances not only within its own communities,
but with disparate other social groups as well. The
muralist Judith Baca, founder of the Social and
Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), an organization dedicated to the documentation and preservation of murals in Southern California, has done the
most to foster cross-cultural unification. Baca's halfmile Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976 - ), probably the
longest mural in the world, is the creation of more
than four hundred multiethnic neighborhood youths
(many from rival gangs), forty artists, fort y historians, and a support staff of over a hundred. The subject matter is also geared toward racial inclusivity,
depicting the construction of the railroads by Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century, the de14
SUSAN LANDA UE R
portation of Mexican immigrants in the thirties,
scenes of Japanese American internment during
World War II, and the 1984 Olympic Games in Los
Angeles. 68
The communitarian impulse evident in Baca's
project, as well as in the Chicano mural movement
generally, runs through a wide range of political art
and, indeed, may be considered one of the defining
characteristics of California's contribution to political art in this country. Instances are as varied as they
are numerous: they include street art, performance
art, installation art, and other forms that do not fit
any particular category. 69 An early and highly influential example is the Artists' Tower of Protest (also known
as the Peace Tower ), erected at the juncture of La
Cienega and Sunset boulevards in Los Angeles in
1966. Designed and built under the direction of sculptor Mark di Suvero and coordinated by Irving Petlin,
the fifty-five-foot tower was decorated with individual antiwar paintings by 418 artists-a virtual who's
who of the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York
art communities.70 Womanhouse (1972) also ranks
among the major landmarks of collective art. For this
site-specific installation, twenty-one students from
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's Feminist Art
Program at CalArts transformed a condemned mansion in residential Hollywood into a series of "fantasy environments," each room exploring the stereotypes and realities of the housewife. 7 1 Bonnie Sherk's
Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974, pp. 228-29)
took populist collectivism to an unprecedented extreme by extending an open invitation to the public
to participate in her "social sculpture." 72 Developed
over a period of seven years on four and a half acres
of land under a freeway interchange in San Francisco,
The Farm consisted of crops and animals, a performance center, and art classes for children, senior citizens, and psychiatric patients.
The utopianism of collective political art in Califo rnia sharply differentiates it from its European antecedents, such as Dada performances in Zurich. The
critic Henry Sayre has argued that at least one strain
of collective expression- performance art- can be
traced to the hippie counterculture in San Francisco,
citing the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967
as a seminal event. 73 Others have found a potent
ource in the antihierarchical ideology of the women's
movement, particularly among feminist groups in
California. 74 But these are manifestations rather than
causes. The communal urge so prevalent in the American West first emerged with the beleaguered counterculture of the Beats, stemming from a desire for
solidarity, shared experience, and a hybrid, synthetic
expression that blurred the boundaries between jazz,
poetry, and painting. One of the first "Happenings"
on the West Coast took place in 1957 (a year before
Allan Kaprow coined the term). Billed as an evening
of "collective expressionism," the event was a collaboration between painters and poets at the 6 Gallery
in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
read poetry while members of the audience used an
ax to chop up a piano and some of the paintings on
display. Ginsberg's legendary reading of Howl at the
same gallery in 1955- which incited something like
the frenzy of a tribal rite-set a precedent for the performative, collective poetry readings that brought
fame to San Francisco. The sixties counterculture,
bolstered by the spread of collective political action,
expanded upon the Beats' holistic, communal ideal,
so much so that it became a leitmotif of the period,
from Ken Kesey's massively attended "acid tests" of
1965-66-rock-and-light shows at which an estimated ten thousand people took LSD-to People's
Park in Berkeley in 1969, and finally to the popular
vogue for communal living and group sex. The driving force behind all of these efforts at unity was not
merely social innovation or fashion, but ultimately a
deeply political yearning to end the rampant divisiveness of the era.
In the seventies and eighties the artists who did
the most to extend the collaborative tradition in
California art tended to be those associated with the
O V ER V I E W: C O UN T E RING C U LTUR E S
SHEILA DE
BRETTEVILLE
WOMANHOUSE
CATALOGUE COVER,
1971
Pi cture d left to right:
Miriam Schapiro and Jud y
Chicag o. © 1971 Through
the Flower Archi ves. Photo:
Courtesy of Through the
Fl ower Archives.
15
ASCO
Left to rig ht: Harry Gamboa
Jr .. Willie Herr6n, Patssi
Valdez, Gronk, and Hum·
berto Sandoval in 197 4.
Photo © 197 4 Harry
Gamboa Jr. Courtesy of
Patricia Correia Gallery,
Santa Monica, California.
16
period's emancipatory movements. Initially they did
so for practical reasons, as many disenfranchised
artists had done before them when they needed
strength in numbers, notably modernists early in the
twentieth century. Artists' cooperatives were particularly vital for artists affiliated with social movements in California because they suffered from demographic and geographic marginalization. After
1970 some of the most radical forms of political art
were the product of artists' collectives that rejected
"high" art by engaging in direct interventions to effect social and political change. The performance
group Asco (Spanish for "nausea"), for example, was
born in 1971 out of the art world's refusal to show the
work of its members-Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk,
Willie Herron, and Patssi Valdez. The group's first
effort was graffiti sprayed on the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art protesting a curator's
stated disinterest in Chicano art. The group went on
to perform a range of guerrilla theater pieces, some
of which were strikingly prescient in their critique of
the conformity of Chicanos within the Chicano
movement. They were more than a decade ahead of
their time in works such as the Instant Mural (1974),
a performance piece that satirized Chicano mural-
SUSAN LANDAUER
ism. Only in the eighties and nineties did the antiassimilation model begin to break down, replaced by
a more inclusive identity politics articulating a theory of "intersectionality" and "post-colonial hybridity."75
As the sociologist Todd Gitlin has noted, the flip
side of the communal strain of the sixties and seventies was a seemingly opposed but equally powerful libertarian tendency that amounted to a cult of the selfsufficient individual searching for maximum personal
freedom. 76 This predilection was especially evident in
the social liberation movements, or identity movements, as they came to be called for their stress on
transcending socially constructed personae. Feminists
were among the first to promote the idea that defining
the self was the first step toward liberation. Faith
Wilding, who was on the ground floor of feminist art
in California as a student of Judy Chicago and Miriam
Schapiro at Fresno State (where the first feminist art
program in America was established in 1970 ), remembers that the feminist artists' slogan from the beginning was "The personal is the political." 77 She recalls how Chicago and Schapiro's program "contested
the canons of Greenbergian formalism" that were the
required curricula of art schools: "Never in our previous art education had we been asked to make work
out of a real life experience, much less one so emotionally loaded .... I remember the almost unbearable mixture of excitement, fear, and pain in the room
as this raw work burst forth .... By fortuitous accident, it seemed, we had stumbled on a way of working: using consciousness-raising to elicit content, we
then worked in any medium or mixture of mediaincluding performance, roleplaying, conceptual- and
text-based art, and other nontraditional tools- to reveal our hidden histories." 78
Numerous artists have since used storytelling as
a means of reclaiming the past-both personal and
collective. Paralleling the literary explosion of culturally diverse self-narratives, some of the most
compelling art of recent years records emotionally
charged recollections, from Roger Shimomura's re-
LONG NGUYEN
TALES OF YELLOW SKIN
#5, 1992
Oil on canvas, 66 x 66 in.
Courtesy of the artist.
embrance of his third birthday in a Japanese Amer.:an internment camp to Carmen Lomas Garza's
emories of tamale making in her childhood home
- Texas. One of the most powerful examples of
rks in this vein, Long Nguyen's series Tales of Yelkin (1991- ), bears witness to the artist's harrow-g experiences as a boy growing up in the midst of
rar-wracked Vietnam.
..\s Faith Wilding suggests, some of the most intite disclosures have come from the feminist move- ~n t , particularly during the early years, when artists
-has Lynn Hershman, Rachel Rosenthal, and Wild-g herself addressed formerly untouchable themes,
-h as menstruation and the female orgasm. In ret years feminists have tended to move away from
body-based subjects but have not abandoned their
preoccupation with intimate autobiography. Linda
Montano's performances have covered a spectrum of
personal topics, from a detailed account of her grief
over her husband's accidental death to her own battles with menopause and aging. Gay and lesbian
artists have also been confessionally frank in their
work. David Hockney's paintings allow a glimpse into
the most confidential aspects of his love life, while
Lari Pittman proclaims his gay sexuality in vast, selfconsciously celebratory canvases.
Attempting to expose the simplistic notions of
ethnic and gender stereotyping, some artists have
taken to fanciful reworkings of identity that go far
beyond the mere exploding of myths. Eleanor Antin,
OV E RVIEW: C OUNTERING CULTURES
17
EL EANOR ANTIN
MY KINGDOM IS THE
RIGHT SIZE, FROM THE
KING OF SOLANA
BEACH, 1974
Gelatin silver print, 6 x 9 in.
Collection of Mildred Lane
Kemper Art Museum, St.
Louis, Missouri. Courtesy
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York.
18
for example, produced a photographic series casting
herself as various outlandish fictional personae, most
provocatively as the male "King of Solana Beach." In
unannounced, spontaneous performances documented by the photographer Phil Steinmetz, Antin
donned a beard, hat, and cape and walked along the
beach among her unwitting "subjects" (mostly teenage boys), bestowing "greetings, advice, and good
wishes." 79 Equally provocative gender-bending can be
found in the tiny jewel-like paintings of Tino Rodriguez, who takes on the guise of bloodthirsty Saint
Sebastians and androgynous mermaids. M. Louise
Stanley has created some of the funniest fictional
selves in her updated versions of Greek myths. Recognizable in her form-fitting capris, striped top, and
flaming-red hair, Stanley plays a starring role in paintings such as Pygmaliana (1984), in which an Adonis
SUSAN LANDAUER
leans out of a canvas to plant a kiss on her lips. Belly
Dancer (1993) has her jumping up and down on a
prone man's stomach to vent the very real frustrations
Stanley feels about the art world's ongoing sexual
discrimination.
Stanley belongs to a distinctive line of Bay Area
artists who employ wit to reveal painful social and political truths. The region's penchant for political humor dates at least as far back as the early forties, when
Clay Spohn painted his Fantastic War Machines, images of Rube Goldberg- like contraptions that mocked
the military's boastful visions of technological prowess.80 In the mid-sixties, political satire returned with
a vengeance in the eye-stinging canvases of Peter Saul.
Using repellent rubbery distortions and lurid colors
to shake his viewers out of their complacency, Saul has
continued to assail American politics and culture. His
r etnam paintings (1965- 72) are particularly shock-;. portraying American soldiers raping, sodomiz- ; . and crucifying Vietnamese women. Later paint-
- gs expose the hypocrisies of American political
ders with venomous satire.
.\nother arch satirist from the Bay Area is Robert
•:neson, whose grotesque caricatures of the sevens placed him alongside Edward Kienholz as one of
-e fo remost California sculptors tackling political
jects. His missile-snouted generals rank among
-e most searing indictments of the military in Amerart. Caricatures of political leaders also figure im- ~nantly in Arneson's work, the best-known being
- - bust of George Moscone (1981, seep. 97), which
--··~ ed an uproar after it was commissioned by the
~ • · of San Francisco and then rejected for its" disrectful" portrayal of the assassinated mayor. The Bay
Area's tradition of irreverent satire survives in the caricature of Enrique Chagoya, who, like Arneson, began his career as a political cartoonist. Since the mideighties Chagoya has delighted in lampooning public
figures, recently casting President George W. Bush
and his cabinet in the roles of Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (Untitled, 2004).
The artist who has probably achieved the most attention for his political satire in recent years is Robert
Colescott. Although Colescott belongs to the generation of Bay Area painters who emerged in the late
sixties and seventies-the East Bay group around Peter Saul and M. Louise Stanley that the art historian
Whitney Chadwick called the Narrative Imagistshis work partakes of the contemporary taste for pastiche and appropriation. 8 1 Colescott hit upon his signature approach in the mid-seventies, when he began
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES
M. LOU I SE STANLE Y
PYGMAL/ANA, 1984
Oil on canvas, 24 x 32Y2 in.
From installation Pompeian
Villa. Courtesy of the artist.
19
ROBERT COLESCOTT
GEORG E WAS HINGTON
CA R VER CROSSING TH E
DEL AWAR E: PAG E
FROM AN AMERICAN
HISTORY TEX TB OOK,
1975
Acrylic on canvas, 84 x
108 in. Collect ion of
Robert and Lois Orc hard .
Courtesy of the arti st and
Phyllis Kind Gallery.
a series of parodies of famous paintings. The subject
had been a staple of Arneson and his students since
the sixties, but Colescott added a distinctive political
twist by substituting white protagonists with blacks.
George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page
from an American History Textbook (1975 ), for example, forces viewers to confront the absence of blacks
in mainstream history and high culture.
Colescott's nomination as the American representative at the Venice Biennale in 1997 coincided
with a major reordering of values in the art world, a
shifting of terms that led to the embrace of figurative
art and its discredited cousin, political satire. Colescott has now been hailed as an important progenitor of contemporary trends. As the art curator Low20
SUSAN LA
DAU E R
ery Sims observed, his narrative approach has secured
him "a key position within the history of American
art" for presaging the revival of figuration and "the
bad manners of Post-modernism." 82 The same claims
have been made for the art of the Chicano and feminist movements. According to painter and poster designer Rupert Garcia, the Chicano artists of the sixties gave rise to the postmodernist disregard for style
development with their insistence on "expressive representationalism."83 Lucy Lippard credited feminist
artists with initiating the "sweeping" changes of the
seventies. "In endlessly different ways," she wrote, "the
best women artists have resisted the treadmill to
progress by simply disregarding a history that was not
theirs. " 84 In Lippard's estimate, the most revolution-
ary contribution of feminist art was not its forms, but
its content-a reversal of Greenbergian priorities.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe
these tendencies as influential rather than revolutionary. Certainly the rise of identity art movements
throughout the United States in the early seventies
marked an end of an aesthetics-based avant-garde .
.-\s the eighties advanced, it became acceptable once
again for artists to address social and political issues
ithout being excluded from the mainstream. 85
But this had been the case in California for decades;
.:ideed, in 1964 the curator Paul Mills commented on
-i,e complete rejection of "the whole power politics
: style" by ostensibly nonpolitical Bay Area Figura·e artists such as David Park, 86 who won much ad~·~ation among his California colleagues in 1957
en he dared to debunk modernism's obsessive ge-ealogy with the comment that "concepts of progress
- ?ainting are rather foolish." 87
'tis this emphasis on individual experience rather
- ,,, on theory or tradition that has largely been rensible for the comparative abundance of political
- in California. The widespread suspicion that for. m's art-for-art's-sake ideal was in fact "a ludifantasy," as the artist/poet Jose Montoya put it,
-- encouraged artists to pursue meaningful subjects
• lurality of styles-even availing themselves of
e ;nost discredited forms. 88 Only in such an artistic
ate could painters like Hans Burkhardt, Irving
::nan, and Llyn Foulkes devote decades to politi-fusent in the traditional medium of oil painting.
:omia has been, if not a haven, certainly an enament where artists have been able to reinvigoe the genre of political art using any means they
-.e, whether old-fashioned easel painting or the
s;: forms of new media. With recent signs that the
"'"tream art world is relinquishing the aesthetics
-eutrality that made Duchamp and Warhol the
,dols of the last century, the artists in this volume
-trike a particular chord of relevance today-·rting values of commitment to the concerns of
.:ollective heart and mind.
LLYN FOULKES
THE CORPORA T£ KISS,
2001
Oil, acrylic, and mixed
media, 31112x261/4 in. San
Jose Museum of Art. Gift of
The Lipman Family
Foundation. © Llyn Foulkes.
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES
21
fO REWORD
1.
4. For a concise discussion of these movements, see Stew-
Susan Landauer, ed., Selections: The San Jose Museum
art Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for
of Art Permanent Collection (San Jose: San Jose Museum
Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990).
of Art, 2004), xvi.
5. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 81.
6. Ibid.
OV ERVIEW : COUNTER I NG CUL T URES
7. Mention of West Coast political art is made in some of
I would like to thank Heather Farkas, Barbara Kutis, Deb-
the large survey books on American art. See, for exam-
bie McKeown, David Richardson, and Lindsey Wylie for
ple, William C. Seitz, Art in the Age of Aquarius, 1955-
their help in researching and fact -checking this essay.
1.
~-
1992), i71-n Seitz identifies San Francisco's "radical and
Straus and Giroux, 1969). "Aesthetics of Silence" is the
revolutionary counterculture," represented especially
title of Sontag's first chapter, an apology for New York's
by Beat assemblagists, as having "initiated the disen-
formalism that echoes the support for the separation of
art and politics in postwar writings of Old Left intellec-
chanted, anarchistic spirit that took hold in New York
after i967." He discusses George Herms, Bruce Conner,
tuals such as Meyer Schapiro.
Wallace Berman, and focuses on Edward Kienholz and
Max Kozloff, " ... A Collage of Indignation," Nation,
Peter Saul (whose name is inexplicably misspelled as
February 20, 1967, 248, quoted in Francis Frascina, Art,
"Peter Dail"). See also Irving Sandler's American Art of
Politics and Dissent: Aspects of theArt Left in Sixties Amer-
the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 293. Most
of Sandler's discussion in his chapter "The Artist as Po-
ica (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 113.
'
1970 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar,
Holland Cotter, "Politics That Makes Peace with the
litical Activist" focuses not on art production but on
Beauty of Objects," New York Times, June 18, 2004.
artists' involvement with political protest. There are also
253
several broad surveys of California visual culture that
New York in 1964, Golub painted his Napalm
discuss political art, although they do not give as much
which protested the Vietnam War, in 1969. Sper
space to the subject as one might expect. Peter Plagens's
also moved to New York in 1964, produced Ion
Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast
zontal paper scrolls depicting screaming heads an1
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974) shows a marked
less bodies. Peter Saul, whose paintings stand ami
formalist bias. His chapter covering Beat assemblage
most savage critiques of the Vietnam War, is ass
does not address the political context of the work and
with Chicago because he showed at the Allen F1
only minimally focuses on content; otherwise he ignores
Gallery. Saul's most vehement political painting
the politics of sixties counterculture and activist art en-
ever, were inspired· by his contact with the Ba)
tirely. Thomas Albright's Art in the San Francisco Bay
sixties counterculture. He lived in Mill Valley du1
Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History (Berkeley: Uni-
critical years of the Vietnam War, from 1964 1
versity of California Press, 1985) briefly discusses the
then moved to Chappaqua, New York, and I
political nature of Beat assemblage, as well as the psy-
Austin, Texas, where he currently resides. Accor
chedelic posters and visionary art of the sixties. The
art historian Franz Schulze, Chicago's "most v
publications accompanying the Los Angeles County
litical art came from the mural movement, wh
Museum of Art's mammoth exhibition of twentieth -
gan with William Walker's Wall of Respect on th
century California art, presented at the museum in
Side and led to a multitude of wall paintings tr
2000, contain essays discussing political art in the state.
out the city, nearly all of them politically hort<
See Peter Selz, "The Art of Political Engagement," and
content." Franz Schulze, "Art in Chicago: the Ti
Chon A. Noriega, "From Beats to Borders: An Alterna-
ditions," inArtin Chicago, 1945-1995, exh. cat. (1
tive History of Chicano Art in California," in Stephanie
Thames and Hudson in association with the tli
Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds.,
of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1996), 26.
Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900- 2000,
10. This is not to say that California's dark side has r
exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of
examined as well. Beginning with Carey McWi
Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
muckraking books, notably Factories in the Fielt
Howard N. Fox, "Tremors in Paradise, 1960-1980," and
Southern California: An Island on the Land (19,
Fox, "Many Californias, 1980-2000," in Stephanie Bar-
California: The Great Exception (1949), Cali
ron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Made
"noir" aspect has been a subject of discussion
in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, exh.
for its utopianism. See also Lars Nittve and HeU
cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
zien, Sunshine and Noir, exh. cat. (Humlebae
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
254
mark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,
19~
8. Thomas E. Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Fu tu
European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1955-69 (New York:
Angeles (New York: Random House, 1992). All
Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 32. Specifically, Crow identifies
studies, however, focus on Southern California,
"Black Friday" of 1960 in San Francisco as the event that
tendency to view Northern California's radical
catalyzed radical activism in both Europe and America.
sign of its tolerance for newness and eccentric
9. Chicago's artists generally rejected the strict formalism
tinues. See, for example, Robbin Henderson's
of New York, remaining figurative throughout the fifties
in The Whole World's Watching: Peace and So
and sixties. The Monster Roster (Leon ·Golub, Cosmo
tice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, exh. cat.
Campoli, Seymour Rosofsky, June Leaf, H. C. Wester-
ley: Berkeley Art Center, 2001): "California's h
mann, Nancy Spero, and Ellen Lanyon) produced some
that of diverse people crossing land and ocea:
sociopolitical satire in the sixties, as did some of the
tie at the extreme western edge of what Eu
Chicago Imagists (including Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson,
called 'The New World.' Like the history of I
Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum) and the Hairy
it is a history of people recreating themselves 1
Who, a subcategory of the Imagists. After moving to
new ways, adapt to new environments, and fc
NOTES TO PAGES 2-3
communities" (1). References to California's "embrace
19. See Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A His-
of the new" in conjunction with its paradigm shifts can
tory of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse (Ur-
also be found in the Los Angeles County Museum of
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
Art's Made in California and Reading California, even
20. See Kevin Starr's discussion of the loyalty oath in the
when the authors are aware they are characterizing an
chapter "Police Action," in his Embattled Dreams: Cali-
image more than a reality. See, for example, Kevin Starr,
fornia in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (London: Oxford
"Carey McWilliams's California: The Light and the
Dark," in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading
Communism was only a secondary concern of uni-
California, 17, and Fox, "Tremors in Paradise," in Bar-
versity regents (the school had "no hard evidence of
ron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Made in California, 193.
Communist Party membership on the part of a single
University Press, 2002), 312-16. In Starr's view, anti-
1i. Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the
UC faculty member"); rather, the loyalty oath had
Making of the American Mind (New York: Free Press,
more to do with xenophobic fears and a desire to re-
1998), 3- 4.
gain control of an institution "that was no longer lo-
12.
John Steven McGroarty, quoted in Carey Mc Williams,
Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake
City: Gibbs Smith, 1946; reprint, 1994), 249.
13. Steve Fox, "From the Beat Generation to the Sanctu-
cal and hence moving beyond their grasp" (315).
21. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.
Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1968), 26.
ary Movement," in Kevin J. Fernlund, ed., The Cold
22. Huginnie, "Containment and Emancipation," 64.
War American West, 1945- 1989 (Albuquerque: Univer-
23. See William Mandel, "Defying the Red-Baiters: The
sity of New Mexico Press, 1998), 147. Until 1957 the city
was also host to the decidedly left-leaning California La-
1960 HUAC Hearings," in The Whole World's Watch-
bor School, which had the largest art department of its
24. David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Com-
ing, 22- 25.
kind in the country. See Mark Dean Johnson, ed., At
ing of Age in the 1960s (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993),
Work: The Art of California Labor (San Francisco: Cali-
687. According to Goines, by September 1961 more than
fornia Historical Society Press, in conjunction with
seventy thousand people had participated in civil rights
Heyday Books, San Francisco State University, and the
California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, 2003).
14. See Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oak-
sit-ins.
25. W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 9i.
land and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: Uni-
26. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 23.
versity of California Press, 1993).
27. Marcia A. Eymann, Introduction, in Eymann and
15. A. Yvette Huginnie, "Containment and Emancipation:
Charles Wollenberg, eds., What's Going On? California
Race, Class, and Gender in the Cold War West," in Fern-
and the Vietnam Era, exh. cat. (Oakland: Oakland Mu-
Jund, ed., The Cold War American West, 55.
seum of California; Berkeley: University of California
16. Kevin J. Fernlund, "Introduction," in Fernlund, ed.,
The Cold War American West, 1.
17. Maria E. Montoya, "Landscapes of the Cold War West,"
in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 16.
18. Stewart Burns pointed out that the free speech move-
ment "was about more than freedom of speech. Re-
Press, 2004), 4.
28. Ibid., 4-5. See also Allison Martin, "The Legacy of Op-
eration Babylift," www.adoptvietnam.org.
29. See Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Histori-
cal Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
portedly, most participants, and the silent majority
30. Asian Americans did, however, participate in the iden-
who supported them, felt alienated in the academic as-
tity movements of the seventies and eighties, in which
sembly line of this huge, impersonal institution that
marginalized groups sought to connect with their cul-
seemed increasingly harnessed to the needs of large cor-
tural heritages. For more on the participation of Asian
porations and the Pentagon." Burns, Social Movements
Americans in this later phase of the liberation move-
of the 1960s, 64.
ments, see Karin Higa, "What Is an Asian American
NOTES TO PAGES
3- 6
255
Woman Artist?" in Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela
erupted after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in
Savioni, eds., Art/ Women / California: Parallels and In-
Greenwich Village, were the watershed for gay ac-
tersections, 1950-2000, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of
tivism in America, sparking the first mass demonstra-
California Press, 2002), 81-94.
tions in gay history and the formation of the Gay Lib-
3i. Huginnie, "Containment and Emancipation," 52-54,
eration Front in New York in 1969. For more on the
58. Asian Americans also enjoyed markedly improved
history of the gay liberation movement in California,
civil rights after the Korean War-for example, the
see Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay:
1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which allowed Korean and
A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area
Japanese immigrants to naturalize and an increase in
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996).
the number of Chinese immigrants. According to Hug-
37. Interestingly, while the political leadership of th e
innie, these improvements were in part motivated by
women 's movement was concentrated in the East, Cali-
international criticism that "challenged the notion of
fornia artists took a leading role in fostering femin ist
the U.S. as the leader of the 'free world' given its treat-
art. As early as 1970 Judy Chicago initiated the Femi-
ment of non-Whites .... In the West, Asian Americans
nist Art Program at Fresno State College (now Cali-
were in the spotlight of this transformation, whereas
fornia State University, Fresno), the first of its kind in
nationally it was African Americans" (52).
the nation . Just a year later she and Miriam Schapiro
32. Ibid., 58. Huginnie points out that even while Japanese
launched another, even more influential program a:
Americans tended to be better educated than whites,
CalArts in Valencia-now legendary for producing
their salaries tended to be lower.
Womanhouse (1972), a feminist installation that in-
volved the collaboration of more than twenty artists.
33. The African American population in California more
than tripled between 1950 and 1970- from 462,172 to
38. Leonard, "Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees," 4-.
1,400,143. Kevin Allen Leonard, "Migrants, Immigrants,
39. Huginnie, "Containment and Emancipation," 63.
and Refugees: The Cold War and Population Growth
40. Leonard, "Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees," 46
in the American West," in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War
4i. Milk's status was recently affirmed by the ongoing ex-
American West, 38.
hibition Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a M od-
34. This was because the draft policy during the Vietnam
ern Gay Martyr, which opened at the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-
War gave exemptions to men in college. A dispropor-
sexual, Transgender Historical Society in San FranciscL
tionate number of working-class white men were also
drafted.
35. Charles Wollenberg, "California and the Vietnam War:
Microcosm and Magnification," in Eymann and Wollenberg, eds., What's Going On?, 17.
36. Some historians date the modern gay movement in
ee Paul J. Karlstrom, "Art Sketches: Notes on die
Central Role of Schools in California Art and Culture.
in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading California, 84-109.
43. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1965 ), re-
California to the early fifties. The repression of homo -
printed in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds.
sexuality in the West spurred resistance early on, be-
Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (
ginning with the formation of the Mattachine Society
York: Harper and Row, 1982), 8.
in Los Angeles in 1950 and the Daughters of Bilitis in
256
on June 26, 2003.
42.
'ei
44. "The group" included Michael Fried, Rosalind KraUS:>
San Francisco in 1955· These groups were semiclandes-
Jane Harrison Cone, and Sidney Tillim. See Frascin.:.
tine and merely sought personal adjustment and social
Art, Politics and Dissent, 142- 43. See also Barbara Reis
acceptance until the mid-sixties, when they opened
"Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View
chapters in New York and began picketing for equal
Studio International 175 (May 1968 ), 254-57 (Part I) , an....
rights in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In San
175 (June 1968), 314- 16 (Part II). An exception to
Francisco, as early as 1966, three days of fighting fol-
formalist approach of Greenberg and others could
lowed a police raid on Compton's Cafeteria, a gay
found in the criticism of Harold Rosenberg, who lookn..
hangout. But the Stonewall riots in New York, which
with disfavor upon Greenberg's limited view of ar.
NOTES TO PAGES
6-8
expressive potential. Yet while Rosenberg appreciated
a wider spectrum of content than most of his col-
West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (New
leagues, he was by no means comfortable with mixing
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991 ).
52. Ginsberg's line concerning Moloch reads: "sphinx of
politics and art, and in the late sixties was openly dis-
cement and aluminum . .. Moloch whose mind is pure
dainful of the New York political group Angry Arts. See
machinery!" Allen Ginsberg, Howl, and Other Poems
Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 132-33.
45. For a fascinating discussion of the suppression of paint-
(Sa n Francisco: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956), 17.
53. Robert Duncan, "The Homosexual in Society," Poli-
ing with political and social themes by the postwar art
tics 1(August1944), 209-11. On publication of this es-
economy, see Bram Dijkstra, American Expressionism:
say, in which he argued that gay writers were obliged
Art and Social Change, 1920- 1950, exh. cat. (New York:
to be honest about their sexuality, Duncan was banned
Harry N. Abrams in association with the Columbus
from the Kenyon Review, at that time America's lead-
Museum of Art, 2003).
46. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 58.
47. Meyer Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Avantgarde Art," Art News 56 (Summer 1956), 36-42, reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers, vol. 2 (New York:
George Braziller, 1978), 213-26.
ing literary journal.
54. Scrapbooks of William Margolis, mid-late 1950s, Williarn Margolis papers, Temple of Man, Beverly Hills,
California.
55. In Richard Candida Smith's words, the poem describes
"Conquest instead of discovery; slavery instead of enterprise; a funeral pyre of indigenous peoples instead
48. Leon Golub, quoted in Frascina, Art, Politics and Dis-
of breadbasket of the world or arsenal of democracy;
sent, 147 (see also Frascina, 140-41). In 1970 Lucy Lip-
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of
pard attacked Judd for expressing his disgust with the
the 'good war"'; see Candida Smith, Utopia and Dis-
war in private meetings with the Art Workers' Coali-
sent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: Uni-
ti on but keeping silent in public, positioning Judd as a
versity of California Press, 1995), 360. Candida Smith
member of "the art community's silent majority"; Lippard, "Art Workers' Coalition: Not a History," Studio
recounts that McClure sent 576 copies of "Poisoned
Wheat" to prominent journalists, and when none re-
International 180 (November 1970 ), 172.
sponded "began to consider whether acts of violence
49. Stewart Burns argues that the New Left looked to the
might ultimately be necessary to sabotage the military
Beat counterculture for inspiration, citing in particular the Port Huron Statement by Students for a Dern-
machine" (360 ). Gary Snyder also presaged many of the
reformist ideas of the New Left; see Candida Smith's
ocratic Society (1962), a critique of American society
chapter "Gary Snyder on the Responsibilities of
that sounds very much like Beat ideology; Burns, So -
Utopia: Expanding the Boundaries of Domesticity"
cial Movements of the 1960s, 58-59. According to Fran -
in New York found "the worlds of the Beats and of the
(372-99).
56. Both Candida Smith and Frascina have described the
Beats' work as "apolitical" in that it did not, on the
'counter-culture' were deeply unsettling"; Frascina,
whole, attempt social change. See Frascina, Art, Poli-
cis Frascina, critics upholding the modernist orthodoxy
Art, Politics and Dissent, 110.
50. Frascina, paraphrasing Billy Al Bengston, Art, Politics
and Dissent, 32.
tics and Dissent, 58, and Candida Smith, 210. William
Seitz, on the other hand, singled out the California
Beats as the most politically effective artists working in
5i. For a comparative presentation of the differences
1950s America, noting that they "were the first to merge,
between the Beat cultures on the East and West coasts,
by new figurative modes, modernism with social crit-
see Lisa Phillips, Beat Culture and the New America
icism"; see Seitz, Art in the Age of Aquarius, 16-17.
(New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in
57. Rebecca Solnit relates that while Herms was living in
association with Flammarion, Paris, 1995). This study,
Hermosa Beach, the accumulated objects he had "har-
however, omits the vital Southern California Beat scene
vested from beaches and vacant lots began to grow into
centered in Venice; see John Arthur Maynard, Venice
art, and by the time [Herms and his wife) left Hermosa
NOTES TO PAGES 8 - 10
257
Beach for Berkeley ... Herms had a good-sized array
to be put down lightly. Hippies have a clear vi i -
of assemblages. Rather than transport all this trans-
of the ideal community-a psychedelic comm um
formed junk, he returned it to its source. He installed
to be sure-where everyone is turned on and beau -
all his early constructions in a nearby area of several
ful and loving and happy and floating free. But it
square blocks of razed houses, where the foundations
a vision [that] necessarily embodies a radical poli -
formed a flat, blank space like a landing strip, and left
ical philosophy: communal life, drastic restrict1
them there to be taken, destroyed, or to disintegrate.
of private property, rejection of violence, creati\i
This was the Secret Exhibition, and he showed it to only
before consumption, freedom before authority, d -
two people, Wallace Berman and the artist John Reed";
emphasis of government and traditional form
Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold
leadership"; Hinckle, "A Social History of th e
War Era, ex.h. cat. (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
pies," reprinted in Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eiser
1990 ), 15.
eds., The California Dream (New York: Collier Boo·
58. Peter Selz, Funk, ex.h. cat. (Berkeley: University Art
Museum, University of California, Berkeley, 1967).
59. For more on the "Digger Feeds" and Haight-Ashbury's
counterculture in general, see Charles Perry, The Haight-
1968), 330.
64. Irving Petlin, quoted in Frascina, Art, Politics and If--
sent, 29.
65. See Patricia Hickson, "National Affairs: Recent \ \·0.
Ashbury: A History (New York: Rolling Stone Press,
by Robbie Conal," Frameworks (San Jose Museu m
1984).
Art) 6 (S ummer 2000), 4.
60. See Fox, "From the Beat Generation to the Sanctuary
66. George Lipsitz, "Not Just Another Social Moveme-
Movement," in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American
Poster Art and the Movimiento Chicano," in Chon.·
West.
Noriega, ed., Just Another Poster? Chicano Graph ic .-1. ~
61. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 171.
in California, ex.h. cat. (Santa Barbara: University.
62. Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 66.
Museum, University of Santa Barbara; Seattle: C -
63. Alan Bisbort, The White Rabbit and Other Delights: East
Totem West: A Hippie Company, 1967- 69 (Sa n Fran-
versity of Washington Press, 2001), 73.
67. Victoria Quintero, ''A Mural Is a Painting on a \ ·
Septemb er~:
cisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996), 3. Very little of
Done by Human Hands," El Tecolote,
substance has been written on the hippie countercul-
1974, 6, quoted in Terezita Romo, ''A Collective Histo.
ture. An excellent essay that is itself a period piece is
Warren Hinckle's "A Social History of the Hippies,"
Art/Women/California, 177.
which appeared in Ramparts before the Summer of
Love, in March 1967. Hinckle insisted that while hippies were dismissed as passive utopians, they were
Las Mujeres Muralistas," in Fuller and Savioni, ed.;
68. Whitney Chadwick, "Reflecting on History as Hi -
ries," in Fuller and Savioni, eds., Art/Women/Cal~--r­
nia, 33.
deeply political. Writing about a "Summit Meeting" to
69. There are so many examples of collective art that on.
discuss the political future of the movement, held in
a fraction can be mentioned. Among the pro_jec
the foothills of the Sierras (participants included nov-
that have included thousands of participants in rece-
elist Ken Kesey and Beat hero Neal Cassady), Hinckle
decades are Ariel's Banner of Hope (1986, p. 78 ), wh1.:
reported that the tone was serious: "They talked about
was created by children, and the NAMES Project AL.
reducing government controls, the sanctity of the in-
Memorial Quilt, an ongoing project conceived in 1
dividual, the need for equality among men. They talked,
in San Francisco by gay rights activist Cleve Jones,·-
very seriously, about the kind of society they wanted to
volving, to date, more than 82,000 family membe:--
live in, and the fact that if they wanted an ideal world
they would have to go out and make it for themselves,
258
Hi~
-
friends, and loved ones of AIDS victims.
70. The Peace Tower was organized by the Artists' Prot :
because nobody, least of all the government, was go-
Committee in Los Angeles. According to Francis Fr;;-
ing to do it for them.
"The utopian sentiments of these hippies were not
scina, "Those participating artists named as 'illustrio
NOTES TO PAGES 10- 15
by the organisers in a fund -raising letter were: Elam.
de Kooning, Herbert Ferber, Sam Francis, Judy Gero-
for "cross-culturalism," particularly after the publica-
witz, Lloyd Hamrol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Jim
tion of her book Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, George Segal,
A relatively recent example of intersectionality is
Jack Zajac, Philip Evergood, George Sugarman, Claes
Thelma Golden's Freestyle exhibition at the Studio
Oldenburg, Cesar, Karel Appel, Jean Helion, Leon
Museum in Harlem, composed of artists who refute
Golub"; Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 17. The
the African American label and whom Golden calls
"post-black"; see Golden et al., Freestyle, exh. cat.
Peace Tower was the model for another bicoastal pro-
duction, Collage of Indignation (1967), organized by
(New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001). On the
Artists and Writers Protest and comprising around 150
West Coast, one of the best articulations of this in-
canvases by individual artists, some of whom, includ-
clusive approach to identity discourse can be found in
ing Petlin and di Suvero, had also contributed to the
the proceedings of an artists' roundtable at the San
Peace Tower.
7i. Laura Meyer, "Constructing a New Paradigm: Women
Francisco Art Institute in 1994, published as Reagan
Louie and Carlos Villa, eds., Worlds in Collision: Dia-
American Artists in California, 1950-2000," in Fuller
logues on Multicultural Art Issues (London: Interna-
and Savioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 104.
72. "Social sculpture" is Daniela Salvioni's term for "in-
terventionist" artists such as Baca, Sherk, Rieko Goto,
tional Scholars Publications in association with the
San Francisco Art Institute, 1994).
76. Todd Gitlin, "Afterword," in Stephen Macedo, ed., Re-
Helen and Newton Harrison, and Suzanne Lacy; see
assessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural
Salvioni, "Introduction: Art in Context," in Fuller and
Legacy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 291-92, para-
Salvioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 7.
phrased in Margaret Crawford, ''Alternative Shelter:
Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The Amer-
Counterculture Architecture in Northern California,"
ican Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of
in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading Califor-
Chicago Press, 1989), 13.
74. Faith Wilding, for example, noted that "The California
nia, 268.
77. Wilding, "The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and
n
branch [of feminism] focused on collaborative art mak-
CalArts," 35.
ing, and education and was less career-based than the
78. Ibid., 34.
New York group"; Wilding, "The Feminist Art Programs
79. Howard N. Fox, "Tremors in Paradise," in Barron,
at Fresno and CalArts, 1970-75," in Norma Broude and
Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The
80. See Susan Landauer, "Painting under the Shadow:
American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact
California Modernism and the Second World War," in
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 290, n. 2.
Paul Karlstrom, ed., On the Edge of America: Califor-
Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Made in California, 232.
75. Although artists such as Judith Baca, Faith Ringgold,
nia Modernist Art, 1900- 1950 (Berkeley: University of
and Adrienne Rich have explored the intertwined is-
California Press in association with the Archives of
sues of racism and sexism since the early days of the
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Fine
feminist movement, it was not until the early eighties
that theorists such as Kimberle Williams Crenshaw be-
Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 50-55.
81. Whitney Chadwick, "Narrative Imagism and the Fig-
gan to speak of such ideas as "intersectionality." See
urative Tradition in Northern California Painting," Art
Crenshaw's "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black
Journal 45 (Winter 1985), 309. Chadwick describes
Live Crew" for a shrewd discussion
artists such as Colescott and Stanley as having "pro-
of structural, political, and representational intersec-
duced works in which social comment, satire, moral-
tionality, in Mari J. Mastuda et al., eds. Words That
ity plays, puns, and personal mythology combine with
Feminism and
2
Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the
flamboyant and eccentric personal styles to form a vi-
First Amendment (Bo ulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
sual running commentary on the world."
1993), 111- 32. Lucy Lippard became a major advocate
82. Lowery S. Sims, "Robert Colescott, 1975-1986," in Rob-
NOTES TO PAGES 15-20
259
ert Colescott: A Retrospective, 1975-1986, exh. cat. (San
Democratic Republic, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 1987), 3.
vard University Press, 1989).
83. Rupert Garcia, quoted in Richard Griswold del Castillo,
6. Bernhard Heisig, conversation with Dore Ashton, Pe-
Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds.,
ter Nisbet, and the author, Leipzig, February 6, 1988;
Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985, exh.
quoted in Peter Selz, "Revival and Survival of Expres-
cat. (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1992), 23.
sionist Trends in the Art of the GDR," in ibid., 33.
7. Peter Selz, 'l\rt and Politics: The Artist and the Social Or-
84. Lucy R. Lippard, "Sweepi ng Exchanges: The Contri-
der," in Hershel B. Chipp with Peter Selz and Joshua C.
bution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s," Art Jour-
Taylor, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artist:
and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Pres .
nal 40(Fall-Winter1980), 363.
85. For a good overview of the politicization of New York's
avant-garde in the seventies and eighties, see I. Michael
1968), 456- 500.
8. See Peter Selz, German Realism of the Twenties: The
Danoff, "The Establishment of Social and Political
Artist as Social Critic, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Min-
neapolis Institute of Arts, 1980 ).
Art," in Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art from the Eli Broad Family Foundation Collec-
9. Peter Selz, "The Art of Political Engagement," in Steph-
tion, exh. cat. (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art in as-
anie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds ..
sociation with Cross River Press, 1991 ), 8- 16. Danoff
Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-20cx
notes that as late as 1984 viewers were "shocked" by
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Ar.
Content, an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 ), whic"
was a companion volume to the exhibition.
Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. At the time, he
explains, it was still a very new idea for art to be driven
10.
86. Paul Mills, "Bay Area Figurative Art," Art in America
52 (June 1964), 43.
87. David Park, quoted in Paul Mills, Contemporary Bay
Area Figurative Painting, exh. cat. (Oakland, Cal if.:
Oakland Art Museum, 1957), 7.
88. Jose Montoya, quoted in Tere Romo, "Points of Convergence: Iconography of the Chicano Poster," Noriega,
ed., Just Another Poster?, 94.
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteent'!•Century Italy (New York: Oxford University Press..
by "subject rather than style, form, or method" (8).
1972), 36.
INTRODUCTION : PATHS TO ENGAGEMENT
1.
This was the title of a provocative and highly influ ertial book on modernist art: Harold Rosenberg's
r
Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 196<
2. Pablo Picasso, "Statements about the Artist as Poli: cal Being" (1945), quoted in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picas_
Fifty Years of His Life (New York: Museum of Mode!""
PROLOGUE : A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE
INTERACTION OF POLITICS AND AR T
i.
Adolf Hitler, speech at the opening of the Haus der
Man and His Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Bo
deutschen Kunst, Munich, July 18, 1937, cited in Hell-
1969), 143.
4. F. T. Marinetti, "Initial Manifesto of Futurism" (19
mut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 76.
2. This dissertation was the basis for my first book: Peter
Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
3. Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat. (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 12.
4. See Peter Selz, Fifteen Polish Painters, exh. cat. (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961).
5. See Peter Nisbet, ed., Twelve Artists from the German
260
Art, 1946), 248.
3. Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Martin Esslin, Brecht: T'
NOTES TO PAGES 20 - 33
in Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism, exh. cat. (New York: . _...,..
seum of Modern Art, 1961), 124.
5. George Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No (New York:[},
Press, 1946 ), 163.
6. Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera,
ical Politics, and the San Francisco Public Murals (Ber_ •
ley: University of California Press, 1999 ), xvii- xviii
7. Richard Nixon, quoted in George F. Sherman, "D' Nixon, Art Commissar," Nation, January
10,
195J